d much
service, and would have done more, but for the unhappy error into which
the Parliament had recently been led by Harley and Foley. The confidence
which the public had felt in that powerful and opulent Company had been
shaken by the Act which established the Land Bank. It might well be
doubted whether there would be room for the two rival institutions; and
of the two, the younger seemed to be the favourite of the government and
of the legislature. The stock of the Bank of England had gone rapidly
down from a hundred and ten to eighty-three. Meanwhile the goldsmiths,
who had from the first been hostile to that great corporation, were
plotting against it. They collected its paper from every quarter; and on
the fourth of May, when the Exchequer had just swallowed up most of the
old money, and when scarcely any of the new money had been issued, they
flocked to Grocers' Hall, and insisted on immediate payment. A single
goldsmith demanded thirty thousand pounds. The Directors, in this
extremity, acted wisely and firmly. They refused to cash the notes which
had been thus maliciously presented, and left the holders to seek a
remedy in Westminster Hall. Other creditors, who came in good faith to
ask for their due, were paid. The conspirators affected to triumph over
the powerful body, which they hated and dreaded. The bank which had
recently begun to exist under such splendid auspices, which had seemed
destined to make a revolution in commerce and in finance, which had been
the boast of London and the envy of Amsterdam, was already insolvent,
ruined, dishonoured. Wretched pasquinades were published, the Trial
of the Land Bank for murdering the Bank of England, the last Will and
Testament of the Bank of England, the Epitaph of the Bank of England,
the Inquest on the Bank of England. But, in spite of all this clamour
and all this wit, the correspondents of the States General reported,
that the Bank of England had not really suffered in the public esteem,
and that the conduct of the goldsmiths was generally condemned. [701]

The Directors soon found it impossible to procure silver enough to meet
every claim which was made on them in good faith. They then bethought
them of a new expedient. They made a call of twenty per cent. on the
proprietors, and thus raised a sum which enabled them to give every
applicant fifteen per cent. in milled money on what was due to him. They
returned him his note, after making a minute upon it that